“A Beautiful Mess” by Search the City, Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Last summer, I wrote about the opening track, "My Secrets Have Secrets Too," to Search the City's sophomore record, Flight. A few days later, I realized that the song wasn't showing up in my AppleMusic playlist (see August 2021). It turns out that the version I bought in 2013 on the iTunes Store and the version that eventually made its way back to Spotify and AppleMusic in 2020 are quite different. The version I bought has the track listing on Discogs.com, while the a-cappella intro is missing on from the streaming services and the remaining 11 tracks are scrambled in a new order.

THEY SEE YOU LOSING HOPE. I'm interested to find out why "My Secrets Have Secrets Too" didn't make it to the streaming version of the album. The band had a lot of trouble getting the rights to their record after a lawsuit with their former manager, who claimed the rights to the record. What was hoped to be a comeback record and a reboot of the pop-punk band, ultimately became a point of contention with the band and their management. After losing the rights to their music, the album was taken down from iTunes and was only reintroduced to streaming in 2020. You can still find the album in its original version on Search the City's bandcamp page. It's unfortunate that this band's career was halted by a manager who claimed the rights to their music, and because of this manager, they never got a solid second shot. But sometimes, isn't that just life? What a "Beautiful Mess" this record has proven to be.

YOU’RE SUCH A PRETTY FACE. Speaking of beautiful messes, I think that it's about time to address the "fallen girl" archetype in pop-punk and emo. You don't have to look far to find misogamy in these genres. It's well documented in some of the most popular songs. But, as YouTuber Polyphonic points out in his video "A Love Letter to Pop Punk," although there are some valid examples of sexism in the the '00 genre, other genres also were subject to misogamy's ugly head as well. And while today's song may not be the most explicit example of a "fallen girl" trope, a conversation with another teacher about a story we teach in our curriculum made me think about how much "benevolent sexism" was part of my everyday life from church, to youth group, to Christian Rock. There's a message about how a boy needs to tell a girl that she's worth it and that she's beautiful, in a similar way that we can't know our true worth without Christ telling us that we're worthy. Again, I admit that this may be a stretch reading into the lyrics, but talking about the Persian fairy tale of "Simorgh," particularly the roles of women in the story, had my co-worker in a heated fury about sexist tropes in literature and movies into the 21st century. So, I thought about today's song. Why does this "beautiful mess" need some young guy to sing about her?

Read the lyrics on Genius.